“Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he’s something innately superior, something eternal–and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.”

Don’t force me into saying what I don’t want to say, and what I won’t say.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

Death’s an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?

Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.

What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

Belonging to oneself–the whole essence of life lies in that.

No matter how often you knock at nature’s door, she won’t answer in words you can understand–for Nature is dumb. She’ll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn’t expect a song.

Love isn’t actually a feeling at all–it’s an illness, a certain condition of body and soul…. Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will–just like cholera or a fever.

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.

Example is the softest and least invidious way of commanding.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

The most disgraceful cause of the scarcity [of remedies] is that even those who know them do not want to point them out, as if they were going to lose what they pass on to others.

I don’t know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties.

You think you might know something about yourself or why you act or react in certain ways and then you come to new information and suddenly you see your past and your present in a completely different light.

You have to know what you want to get it.

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

The politician is the creature of the public sentiment — never goes ahead of it because he depends on it . . .